Global law company Elevate has hired Simon Heyrick as its new chief financial officer, as it prepares for an AIM listing or significant capital raise in 2021 or 2022.
Heyrick, who will report to Liam Brown, Elevate’s chairman and CEO, was previously CEO of Los Angeles-headquartered health and wellness company Soothe, where he built the finance department from the ground up. raising capital, implementing controls and scaling the organization. Prior to that, he was CFO of MarketShare (acquired by Neustar Inc.) and was CAO for Green Dot.
Brown told Legal IT Insider: “We brought Simon in to help us prepare for an AIM listing or a very significant capital raise in 2021 or 2022, likely to make a further acquisition. All the acquisitions we made a year ago have overperformed against plan, the integrations are on track (the first half of the year doing so many integrations was a tremendous amount of work), all the executives have remained with Elevate, and we are finalizing brand convergence to all the businesses operating under one Elevate brand early in 2020. But I need to take a breather this year!”
Elevate in June raised $25m led by LA private equity firm Kayne and has had a run of acquisitions since the middle of 2018 including AI specialist LexPredict; contract lifecycle management provider Sumati Group; UK NewLaw resourcing firm Halebury; law company Yerra Solutions and Hong Kong-based flexible legal resourcing business Cognatio Law.
Brown added in a statement: “Simon’s experience building finance departments, raising capital, implementing controls and scaling organizations will be invaluable to us as we continue to grow. He will be a great financial and strategic partner for our management team for what we plan to achieve together over the next few years.”
Heyrick said, also in a statement: “In a relatively short time, Elevate has become a leading law company and in the coming years is well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunities in the modernizing legal sector. I believe that my past experience helping companies scale, combined with my passion for improving efficiency by leveraging data to implement controls and processes, make this a great mutual fit.”
Heyrick assumes the Elevate CFO role from Rick Learman.